Hero Pins Biker With His Car The Flees

This Florida State Trooper in an unmarked Monte Carlo, attempts to pull over a motorcycle with a questionable technique. The resulting traffic stop includes the police car pinning the bike against the shoulder barrier, after which the officer tries to evade the citizen filming the encounter.

According to the Youtube description, the officer’s name is Sgt. Spencer Ross who has a history of chasing motorcycles, violating Florida Highway Patrol policies and that most of his arrests and citations of bikers are falsified. Take that with a grain of salt, but his actions in this particular incident a certainly suspect.

Members are authorized to pursue suspects who they reasonably believe have committed:

A felony offense;

a violation of section 316.192 (reckless driving);

a violation of section 316.193 (DUI).

Each decision must be based upon the conditions and circumstances existing at the time and by the training and guidelines set forth by the agency.

ALL OTHER PURSUITS ARE PROHIBITED

While the events preceding the traffic stop are not recorded, the officer’s attempt at running from the cameraman sure appears to be a guilty response.

The FHP claims: “On March 17, Sgt. Spencer Ross was trying to make a traffic stop on a motorcycle rider for running the toll and speeding on State Road 408 in the Orlando area, according to FHP.” Claim is the key word. The FHP could be trying to protect the Blue Line. It’s hard to say.

Ross was the 2011 State Law Enforcement Chiefs Association Officer and Investigator of the Year. In other words, if he is found to be in the wrong, this could be pretty embarrassing. All things considered, running through a toll booth, while not something we should do, doesn’t warrant what could have cost the rider his life.

About twenty years ago, when I was about as old as The Simpsons are now, I was asked to decide whether a man would ever leave federal prison alive.

I was a rookie federal prosecutor, and the guy was one of my defendants. He robbed banks to support his heroin habit. He brandished a gun, and was caught with it when he was arrested after the fifth bank. His fate was sealed by the decision to prosecute him federally. The feds charged him with five counts of bank robbery and five counts of carrying a firearm in the course of a federal crime. (Bank robbery is a federal crime when the victim bank is insured by the FDIC.)

That carrying charge — under title 18, United States Code, section 924(c) — carried a mandatory minimum term of five years for the first charge, and twenty-five years consecutive for each subsequent charge, to be added on top of any sentence for the underlying crime.

I’m not bothered by the concept that a heroin addict who goes on an armed bank robbing spree should get a substantial sentence to incapacitate him.

But I am troubled that 26-year-old me — callow, righteous, and stupid in a highly educated way — was asked to recommend whether he’d get at least 30 years, or at least 55, or at least 80. It was my case, and so I was asked to recommend to the Chief of the Criminal Division how many counts of Section 924(c) the guy had to plead to.

I recommended two — the cautious and midline answer — resulting in a thirty-year mandatory minimum sentence, plus a guideline sentence for bank robbery. Could I have gotten away with one, resulting in a five-year mandatory minimum, or three, resulting in a 55-year mandatory minimum? Probably. I can be pretty persuasive.

In the federal system, the guy will do at least 85% of his sentence. I could check how much time he has left, but I don’t remember his name.

Should I, at 26, have had that sort of power? Should even a veteran prosecutor have it?

[to flog this dead horse yet again, THERE IS NO RIGHT AGE WHERE you have the right to be the decider. This whole system stinks to high heaven. Only a demon with no soul, could talk about all this pure evil with such a light air and untroubled aloofness. That’s my bigotry again. It’s always my companion when I think about the state.]

Few journalists understand federal sentencing, and as a consequence few citizens understand it. The ridiculously complex federal sentencing guidelines are a constant source of confusion, and this confusion helps obscure the vast power prosecutors have to guide the sentence by choosing the charges to which defendants may plead.

Take the thoroughly despicable Hunter Moore, revenge pornographer and extortionist.
[wait a damn minute. so now we’re talking about people who were paid money to be filmed having sex on camera. And somehow the capitalist who did this willing deal is the bad guy. And the socialist leaches in govt are the good guys? Open wide, here comes a TORRENT of FISHEADS for you.]

He’s signed a plea agreement committing to plead guilty to unauthorized access to computers and to aggravated identity theft. That’s based on his participation in a scheme to hack into women’s accounts and steal their intimate pictures using their misappropriated usernames. He’s going to jail, and he ought to. But who ought to decide how long he spends there?
[On what authority, are you qualified to say what ought to be done. You’re a monster. Thousands of times worse than any porno film producer.]

The federal judge who sentences him will have only limited power to determine his sentence, thanks to clever exercise of prosecutorial power. The extraordinarily versatile federal criminal code lets prosecutors guide the sentence by choosing what to charge and then what to offer as a plea deal. Here, in addition to the obvious charges (plain-vanilla conspiracy, and hacking under the rather vague and antiquated 18 U.S.C. section 1030), prosecutors cleverly charged him with seven counts of aggravated identity theft under 18 U.S.C. section 1028A, on the theory that Moore and his co-conspirator used the victims’ misappropriated identity — their account usernames — to steal their pictures for profit.
[blah blah, I’m innocent. It’s the system that’s evil. Just doing my job Heil Hitler.]

That section carries a two-year mandatory minimum sentence. That effectively gave prosecutors the power to determine whether or not Hunter Moore would go to federal prison, by determining what guilty plea they offered him. For better or worse, Moore’s plea agreement shows that the recommended sentence under the federal sentencing guidelines is quite lenient: the parties stipulate to start at an offense level of 8, which permits probation as a sentence. The government may well argue for multiple enhancements, but the likely range of recommended sentences is low. But the government exercised its power to make Moore plead to one count of aggravated identity theft, putting a mandatory-minimum two year floor on his sentence, on top of which the judge will impose the guideline sentence. Moore’s quite fortunate that the aggravated identity theft statute is relatively lenient about mandatory minimums; it gives the judge discretion whether to make them consecutive when there are multiple counts. In other words, if the feds made Moore plead to five counts of aggravated identity theft, the mandatory minimum sentence would still be only two years. That’s in sharp contrast with most mandatory minimums, like the one I was called upon to recommend twenty years ago.

Do I think Hunter Moore should do less than two years? No, absolutely not. I think he should do more.
[fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, YUMMMMM!]

Do I think federal prosecutors should have absolute discretion and power to determine whether or not people charged with crimes should do at least two years in federal prison, or get some other sentence the judge thinks is appropriate? No. That scares the hell out of me. Hunter Moore is not a sympathetic defendant, and the hacking in which he participated is clearly malicious and criminal. But the feds have stretched and distorted ambiguous federal computer statutes to prosecute the likes of Lori Drew (federally prosecuted for creating a fake MySpace account to mock her daughter’s rival), Aaron Swartz (prosecuted for mass-downloading scholarly articles to make them free to all), or the troll Weev (prosecuted for guessing URLs correctly to demonstrate a serious flaw in AT&T’s online security). Not all potential defendants are Hunter Moores.
[roly poly FISH HEADS]

Two two-year mandatory-minimum power is modest, compared to the power I exercised over that bank robber’s life, and compared to the power routinely exercised over the lives of drug defendants. But the power to determine whether someone might get probation or home detention, or whether they must do two years in federal prison, is still mighty. As of now, as the Moore case illustrates, if you misuse someone else’s username for profit, federal prosecutors will decide whether or not you go to jail for two years. The judge will decide how much time to tack onto that, but with respect to that two years, the judge is just along for the ride.

Why should we trust that power in the hands of the federal government? Why should we give that sort of power to people like me?

I had no idea any police departments had Monte Carlo’s in their fleets. And unless this video is really old, what department would have a car that old still in their fleet (it would be over 15 years old by now).

If I was being chased by a guy in a unmarked Monte Carlo, I would be running too, I would be thinking fake cop! Not that a real cop is better in this case. I would especially be running if he was pulling stunts like that.

I am thinking, that is that’s a** whipe personal car. I bet he installed cop equipment in his own car because he is that kind of hard a**.

And of course he has a history of these types of abuses. He is just like that cop in my parts that broke out that motorists window for a seatbelt violation a few months ago. He has a history just like that guy in the video. And large payouts still don’t get these guys benched. He is back on the street, I bet that cop is back on the street to.

In the case of this video, I think the horn blast from the cameraman saved that cyclist from that cop. Not just from getting a ticket.

Those Monte Carlo’s have been used by cops but they all went to the junkyard in my area years ago. Turns out it was a real cop, but the sketchy appearance I wouldn’t have stopped for him either. It’s one thing to be stopped by a state thug it’s quite another to be on the side of the road with someone pretending to be a state thug.

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Eric started out writing about cars for mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Times, Detroit News and Free Press, Investors Business Daily, The American Spectator, National Review, The Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journal.